Gang-plagued Northeastern Mexico Punishes the PRI

Supporters of Enrique Pena Nieto, presidential candidate for the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), gather at their party's headquarters as exit poll results begin to come in for general elections in Mexico City, Mexico, Sunday. Mexico's old guard sailed back into power after a 12-year hiatus Sunday as the official preliminary vote count handed a victory to Pena Nieto, whose party was long accused of ruling the country through corruption and patronage. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)

The votes are still being counted this morning, but Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will be Mexico’s next president, taking office on December 1.

Trying to dispel the perception that as president he’ll cut deals with Mexico’s powerful criminal gangs, Peña insisted in his victory speech late Sunday that no such plans are in the cards. Skepticism may be in order: the PRI, through its seven decades of control in Mexico last century, cut those deals as a matter of course, setting the stage for the current violence now racking the borderlands and deep into the Mexican interior.

But Sunday’s vote in northeastern Mexico, governed by the PRI and in the past two years having suffered as much or more as any other are of the country, might suggest Peña will have good reason to hang tough against the thugs.

Voters in Tamaulipas, which has been a PRI bastion since the PRI’s founding, went for Josefina Vazquez Mota, candidate of President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party. Neighboring Nuevo Leon state — basically metropolitan Monterrey and a clutch of rural towns — also went overwhelmingly for Vazquez.

With 90 percent of nationwide precincts counted this morning, Vazquez was also neck and neck with Peña — each with a third of the vote — in Veracruz state, where the PRI has never lost the governorship.

Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has about 30 percent of the Veracruz vote, proving the state that has been a bellwether of recent Mexican politics, to be sharply divided. Many voters blame the previous state governor, a PRI stalwart, for the the violence of the Zetas gang currently racking Veracruz.

These are the “three states where citizens suspect their local authorities of complicity or, in some cases, grave omissions with managing the rise of the Zetas,” notes Andrew Selee, of the Wilson Center in Washington, who closely follows Mexican politics and public security issues.”

Mexico’s electorate remains deeply divided.

And narcotics corruption has become deeply, perhaps intractable, embedded in the governing class. But the vote in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Veracruz might offer a hopeful sign that citizens are willing, able and ready to punish politicians for their sins.

[...] Chronicle, he argues that voters have already punished the party in this election for some of this alleged corruption in “three states where citizens suspect their local authorities of complicity or, in some cases, [...]

[...] Chronicle, he argues that voters have already punished the party in this election for some of thisalleged corruption in “three states where citizens suspect their local authorities of complicity or, in some cases, [...]